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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> Even publishing the results of an election is an attempt to control discourse and to dominate the minds of the population

and

> The only true news is sports scores.

I fail to see the difference between these two examples. Both report on an actual outcome. Same with things like stock price movement, etc. If your point is that choosing what to report on is a means to control discourse, then I would assert that even reporting on sports scores falls in that category.

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You'd have to be pretty simple to think that election results report on accurate outcomes. Most people in the world don't believe that at all. Taking the past two US presidential elections, most people thought either 2016 or 2020 was fraudulent. Election results are information wars like campaigns. The fight is over control of the narrative and the power legitimated by the accepted narrative. Hence the exceptional brouhaha over questioning the legitimacy of elections. Such talk must be brutally suppressed by the victor, if able. If the winner is not able to suppress challenges to its legitimacy then you have a real problem of how to justify your authority. Even explicit autocracies hold elections for this purpose.

> You'd have to be pretty simple to think that election results report on accurate outcomes.

Thanks, yes I’m simple.

> Taking the past two US presidential elections, most people thought either 2016 or 2020 was fraudulent.

As far as I know this isn’t true. Most people in the US do not believe that either 2016 or 2020 were fraudulent.

For instance, here are the front pages of many newspapers after the 2016 election results: https://www.vox.com/presidential-election/2016/11/9/13572686...

Can you point to data sources that substantiate your claim?

Maybe you missed the extremely effective Russiagate psyop or that a majority of half the electorate believes Biden's election was fraudulent. Combined it looks like 50-60% believe EITHER one OR the other was fraudulent. (OK, you're right if you include children in the set, but then we have a significant part of our population believing in Santa Claus.) A headline from the days after the election only substantiates my argument. The narrative war was far from over in Nov 2016.

I hope I don't have to convince you that Trump voters have little confidence in 2020 results. Here are a couple of reminders that Clinton voters felt similarly after 2016.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106591291876800...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/hillary...

The difference is that election coverage includes tons of bias, including "calling" it for regions or states before final results are in, sometimes incorrectly, and with bias towards the preferences of whoever owns the channel/publication. This style of coverage is full of conversation and discourse and all it takes it recalling the night Trump won in 2015 where every single news channel except Fox was expressing disappointment and shock and surprise.

The above poster was making a different and stronger claim: that publishing even the results of an election is a form of control and not truly “News.”

As others have pointed out, this doesn’t hold water. Publishing the result of some fact that people care to know about is arguably even the purest form of “news”: election results, sports scores, stock prices, etc

There are simple facts like sports scores, and complex, ambiguous, controversial, contentious facts, like election results.

Scores are ambiguous ("where exactly did the ball land?"), controversial and contentious, resulting in endless video replays and accusations of biased refs.

Where do the sports without ambiguous, controversial and contentious scores hire their bias-free referees?

No, you're right. What started as a small, humourous concession to the possibility of straight up news falls apart on analysis. But its failure supports my main point pretty well. If sports scores are contentious claims aspiring to the status of fact, then what of wars and elections? The only "fact" is that they are published in newspapers.

Just because someone doesn’t believe something doesn’t mean it isn’t so. Just because some don’t believe something doesn’t mean it should count as news.

> recalling the night Trump won in 2015

This doesn't really impact the point you're trying to make, but the election was in 2016, not 2015.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

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